Measures relating to Issue 15

MEASURE 1: IMMIGRANTS, MIGRANT WORKERS AND FOREIGN STUDENTS SHOULD BENEFIT FROM DUE PROCESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS:

New legislation should reinforce legal immigrants’ rights to benefit from human rights and a fair, safe, and timely determination of their status. All people, regardless of their country of origin or their immigration status, deserve to be treated fairly, respectfully, and with dignity. Everyone has a right to equal treatment under the law.

Once legally in the country, withholding social services to an immigrant is discriminatory. Migrant workers deserve safe and adequate housing and sanitary facilities. The Joubert Holistic Governance campaign is in favor of policies that fully integrate and support immigrants as equal members of Washington State’s communities, including programs offering immigrants instruction in English, interpretative and translation services of governmental documents and services, and preparation for citizenship.

Likewise with policies that encourage foreign students to remain in the United States and give them an opportunity to earn permanent residency. We also favor an expeditious process to clear the immigration backlog and avoid lengthy detentions for adults and children as well as an end to deportation or detention, without due process of law, of any person who is a primary or sole caregiver for a minor child or disabled dependent. Immigrant workers should be protected from discrimination in wages and working conditions, including access to safe and adequate housing, medical care and educational opportunities. They should be protected from exploitation.

MEASURE 2: ILLEGAL AND UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS SHOULD BE TREATED WITH FAIRNESS

Illegal immigrants must be treated humanely, with due process in all proceedings. Allowing undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children who have attained the age of majority to apply for U.S. citizenship without first being required to return to their country of origin should be the norm. Likewise with extending temporary residency to children of undocumented immigrants to allow them to pursue higher education or national service and to be given an opportunity to earn permanent residency.

On the other hand, enforcement of the laws which penalize employers who knowingly employ undocumented immigrants is desirable, if only because they are not competing fairly with rival employers who do employed documented legal immigrants.

Undocumented immigrants should be protected from exploited workforce. If an undocumented immigrant who has been in the US 5 years, if she or he shows motivation and skills (or willing to learn and excel), he or she should be considered for legal immigration status and all the more so if he or she has a family member in the US who is a resident or if the candidate is a political victim of his country. This could be done on a probationary period.

MEASURE 3 ON ASSYLUM

The Joubert campaign also favors expediting procedures for granting asylum to persons fleeing from areas of war, genocide, and political oppression, subject to appropriate and strict security concerns so as to avoid mass shootings and other crimes. The United States has signed treaties to this effect and Washington State is under the obligation to respect them.

MEASURE 4: NO PROBABLE CAUSE, NO ID CHECK

The Joubert Holistic Governance campaign opposes the police demands for immediate presentation of documents regarding one’s status in the United States as long as there’s no probable cause regarding a crime. Police officers should be respectful at all times. Disrespect triggers fear and fear tends to produce violence.

MEASURE 5. SANCTUARY CITIES

A sanctuary city is a city in the United States or Canada that has policies designed to not prosecute people solely for being an illegal alien in the country they are currently living in. These practices can be by law (de jure) or they can be by habit (de facto). The term generally applies to cities that do not allow municipal funds or resources to be used to enforce federal immigration laws, usually by not allowing police or municipal employees to inquire about an individual’s immigration status.

Given the reality of a small number of undocumented immigrants who have become violent criminals, the Joubert Holistic Governance campaign team believes that sancturary cities should cooperate with federal and state authorities in identifying serious documnented risks and dangers to the Community. Legislation should facilicate the naturalization of safe working undocumentary immigrants so that they are legal. Using sanctuary cities to hide potentially dangerous non documented immigrants should not be legal.

MEASURE 6: CONTRIBUTION TO WORLD DEVELOPMENT WHICH WOULD HELP TO SOLVE THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION ISSUE WHILE BETTERING WASHINGTON AND THE UNITED STATES’ INTERNATIONAL IMAGE

Washington should lead by example and work within the world community in a spirit of peace, cooperation and generosity to support freedom and democracy.

Using the CPPC, diplomacy and sustainable development, we should do what we can to improve the social, economic and environmental conditions that contribute to undocumented immigrants coming to into the United States. In this perspective, part of the National Guard and the Civil Peace and Prosperity Corps will be mandated to help peoples of poor and deserted zones meet their basic needs. In this perspective, after 6 weeks of sustainability training, Washingtonians would have the possibility to participate for a few months in the above-mentioned program. Although poor countries are the prime target of this program, conflictual zones like in Tibet may be considered too. In the State’s foreign assistance to reduce poverty, improve health and education, provide sustainable access to safe water and food free of contaminants, and prevent and treat pandemic and endemic diseases, among other missions, we should help to organize programs that support family planning.

MEASURE 7: A WASHINGTON STATE DEPARTMENT OF PEACE EDIFICATION AND POSSIBLE AMENDMENT OF THE STATE CONSTITUTION ON UNDECLARED WAR SITUATIONS

In this context, a Washington State Department of peace and reconstruction may be useful. To be pondered upon after the primaries elections. If the People will it, then a holistic task force will study this possibility as well as the possibility to amend the State Constitution (with Olympia’s Supreme Court’s benediction) so that the State Legislature may have the freedom to vote on the progressive return of all Washingtonian national guards from undeclared, expensive and vain unconstitutional wars that serve more the oil and weapons barons than international peace, national interest and Washington State’s prosperity.

Open multilateral approach to the State’s international relations, including participation in multilateral peacekeeping missions can be envisaged.

We should press upon Washington D.C. to revise the War Powers Act to assure that Congress must declare unconstitutional a war that is not declared valid by Congress. And to ensure that Congress can declare an end to a war.

Honoring the ratification of international treaties protecting civilian populations, human rights, and addressing climate change, such as the original U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Land Mine Ban Treaty are also State duties.

MEASURE 8: RULES FOR WASHINGTON STATE’S MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES:

Washington should prohibiting its companies from engaging in practices abroad that would be prohibited at home, such as dumping of products and importing products made by exploiting the environment, local communities and people.

Prohibiting multinational corporations, their affiliates, subsidiaries and/or franchises from operating in violation of international law. Outlawing the sale of, and importation to, the United States of all products of slave labor and child labor.

Fair trade among nations based on sound environmental principles, sustainable agriculture and manufacturing, and democratic and economic rights of the workforce should be the norm.

We may need to renegotiate international trade agreements to deal adequately and transparently with human rights, labor rights, and environmental rights and other laws, including but not limited holistic regulation to minimize outsourcing and maximize full and meaningful employment.

The Joubert Holistic Governance campaign would oppose Washington companies from the production, testing, stockpiling and use of “depleted” uranium (dU), chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons and mine bombs. Animals should always be treated humanely. And the Environment with respect, in particular regarding carbon and toxic emission.

CONCLUSION

40,000 children die un-necessarily each day in the world (a Unicef figure). Often as a result of the Big Powers’ greed, rivalries and imperial misconduct. Washington State’s elected agents, like all of the Union’s elected agents, have therefore the sacred duty to help immigrants, documented or undocumented, but within the confines of the Law.

When developing countries inhabitants are forced to sell their organs ((ie, the kidney market is still spreading) and sometimes even their children, when predatory cigarette companies hook African adolescent with free cigarettes and then make them pay once they are addicted, when the IMF-World Bank forces developing countries to pay debts over addressing essential needs, when neo-liberal policies on world industrial and agri-business development take over developing countries’ land in order to feed cattle or grow legume to make cattle fat, depriving the poor of his means of existence, when GMO-glyphosate toxicity poison the masses and the Environment, Washingtonians should set an example and help out, and all the more so when Federal Government agents have deviated from their constitutional and international responsibilities.